LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



A TO LOG I A PRO ECCLESIA DOGMATA. 



REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED 



A CONTRIBUTION 



TO PRESENT DAY CONTROVERSIES. 



REV. R.J. COOKE, D.D 



A:;thor of " Doctrine of the Resurrection," etc. 




301888 * 



NEW YORK: PHILLIPS & HUNT. 

CI NC INN A TI: CRANSTON & STOIVE. 

1888. 



»y; 



Copyright, 1S88, by 
PHTLLIPS & HUNT, 

New York. 



The Library 
of Congress 



WASHINGTON 



PREFACE 



IN" the following pages I have attempted to set forth 
in a way understandable of the people a defense, 
not of Church confessions, but of the idea of Church 
creed. In the first part it may seem to the critic that 
the difference between dogmatics and creed is not suf- 
ficiently marked; but he who carefully studies the 
whole subject will justify the method of argument, 
for he will see that the difference between the facts of 
objective religion and creed is not greater than the 
distinction between creed and confession of faith. The 
evidences of religion are Reasons for Creed. It may 
also be objected to that I have not sufficiently enlarged 
upon certain points. But I have not intended to com- 
pass the whole argument of any point ; condensation, 
and not elaboration, being the thing desired, since this: 
little work is written not so much for technical schol- 
ars as for the people in general. I did intend to add 
a few sections on the Criteria of Faith, but on further 
reflection have decided to publish a separate work on 



4 PREFACE. 

that subject, lest this work should become too large. 
For this same reason multitudinous notes and refer- 
ences which, while they are delightful to the student, 
are distracting to the general reader, have been omitted. 
But should any one desire to pursue the subject far- 
ther, the following works may be referred to : Swain- 
son's ITulsean Lectures, 1857; Baumgarten's Neces- 
sitous lib. Symbolic ; Chastel, d£ Usage des Conf. de 
fois ; Neislingius, de Usu Symholorum / S. Bates, 
Creeds and Confessions Defended ; J. Carlisle, Use 
and Abuse of Creeds / Meyer, de Utilit. et Hist. 
Sy?nb. Ecclesice ; Pressly on Church Fellowship. 

Hoping that this work will be, as one of the ripest 
scholars among us thought it would be, " of value to 
the Church," I send it forth upon its misssion. 

R J. C. 



CONTENTS. 



Page. 

General Remarks 7 



PART FIRST. 

Objections 17 

Section 1 18 

Section II 22 

Section III 34 

Section IY 45 

PART SECON D. 

REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED. 

Section 1 53 

Section II 59 

Section III 67 

Section IV 74 



Reasons for Church Creed. 



GENERAL REMARKS. 



IF one were asked, "What is the most formidable op- 
ponent of modern Christianity ? he would probably 
mention before all else, " Modern thought," and, as 
included therein, materialism, idealism, evolutionism, 
and rationalism. Such an answer would be only 
approximately correct. Indifferentism has a better- 
grounded claim to that bad eminence than any of the 
phases of modern unbelief. That infidelity which 
boldly and coarsely denies the existence of a personal 
God and related truths is not the enemy which does 
the most harm. The worst infidel is the man who says 
he believes in God and in Christ, and then lives as if 
there were neither. It would be much nearer the 
truth, because including more, to say that, in the 
nineteenth century the deadliest foe of Christianity 
is civilization. 

By civilization we do not mean that form of human 



8 REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED. 

development which is but another term for Christianity 
itself in its social aspect ; that civilization which is a 
constant protest against a revival of Babylonianism, 
which seeks to subordinate the physical to the spirit- 
ual ; which would make of literature and art and science 
strong angels of ministry to man's highest and holiest 
needs, and by a hearty application of the Christ-doc- 
trine of the brotherhood of man, and a development 
of rational reverence for law and authority, would knit 
society with bands of everlasting strength. We mean 
that civilization — for there are two of them, as there 
have ever been — which is but an apotheosis of the flesh ; 
a refined paganism, atheistic in the head and supersti- 
tious in the heart. The chief glory of such a civiliza- 
tion is material splendor. Whatever contributes to 
that is esteemed a benefaction to the race. Wealth 
and luxury and a barbaric freedom are the ends in 
view ; for, although men boast that intellect rules, yet 
the intellect must be in the stomach, since every-where 
there is evidence of the supremacy of the flesh as 
opposed to the spirit. God may be upon the mount- 
ain, but the golden calf is in the valley, and we wor- 
ship that. Else what shall we say of the materialistic 
tendency of educated thought ; the luxury of the rich 
and the grinding poverty of the poor ; the loss of ideals 
which sweeten life and make it purposeful ; the gross 
realism of literature ; the insatiable thirst for the car- 



GENERAL REMARKS, 9 

nally great with the rotting of social beliefs and vir- 
tues which largely characterize the false civilization of 
anti-Christian society ? It is easier by far to convert 
a tribe, or even a whole nation, of naked savages to 
the humanizing spirit of Jesus, as in the case of the 
Sandwich Islands, than it is to thoroughly Christianize 
the centers of carnal power, as New York or London 
or Paris or Berlin, with all their churches and cathe- 
drals and ministers and mission boards and Bible soci- 
eties and other ecclesiastical arrangements.* " Every- 
where," says an observant writer, " I note the practical 
triumph of that earth-to-earth philosophy which will 
see nothing beyond experience, which shuts off the 
approval of science to all that cannot be weighed and 
measured. Every-where literature and art are losing 
themselves in the most vulgar sensuousness. Look 
throughout Europe, and what, in every country, are 
the great majority of the educated classes who give 
tone to the rest? Skeptics in religion, doubters in 
ethics, respecting nothing but accomplished facts and 
palpable force, with nerves more sensitive than their 
hearts, seeking to season the platitude of existence by 
a more or less voluptuous estheticism." f 

And so it is that, as in the early days of Christianity, 
when it, as the only power which could minister to the 

* See Bib. Sacra., April, 1884, for the literature on the subject. 
f The Fortnightly Review, January, 1887. 



JO REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED. 

" long, slow agony " of worn-out nations, was opposed 
by a civilization which was characterized by immense 
wealth and abject poverty ; which smiled at the gods, 
but fed the sacred chickens ; which wove chaplets of 
flowers for gorgeous feasts and yet was consumed by 
an unutterable sadness, even so now the enemy of 
religion is that civilization which has all the skepticism 
and sensuousness of the Roman without a sufficiency of 
its refinement to save it from contempt. 

It is not strange that such an age should be fruitful 
in oppositions to revealed truth, and that these should 
be of an extreme type. Every position has been at- 
tacked — the Mosaic record, inspiration, miracles, the 
genuineness of the gospels, and even the character of 
the Lord Jesus. Every attack, however, has demon- 
strated the impregnable strength of the Church. But 
the conflict is not ended. Defeated in the attack upon 
sacred Scripture the battle is now against the doctrines 
of Scripture and the declarations of faith in the sym- 
bolic books of the Christian Church. It is a significant 
fact that at a time like the present, when every school 
of thought and scientific association boldly announces 
the results of its study, the same right should be 
denied the Church, and that the necessity for announc- 
ing Christian dogma should be so stoutly resisted not 
only by the opponents of religion, but even by some 
professing believers. 



GENERAL REMARKS. 11 

It is to this particular phase of modern dissent, the 
assault on Church creeds, that attention is here called 
in the hope of showing that there are solid reasons 
why there should be creeds, and that on this subject, 
as in all other questions in religion, the Church invites 
the most painstaking study. We do not ask that 
formulated beliefs be accepted on the plea of antiquity 
or on the authority of renowned theologians, fathers 
or church councils. It is impossible to believe con- 
trary to reason ; and if one should succeed in success- 
fully deceiving himself it is difficult to understand 
how God, who gave man his reason, could be pleased 
with one who should stultify it in this manner. " For 
my part, I am certain that God hath given us our 
reason to discern between truth and falsehood ; and 
he that makes not this use of it, but believes things he 
knows not why, I say it is by chance that he believes 
the truth, and not by choice ; and I cannot but fear 
that God will not accept of this sacrifice of fools." * 
The true believer will insist that impartial criticism be 
applied to every dogma declared binding on the con- 
science as w r ell as to those theories and hypotheses in 
philosophy and physics which demand the assent of the 
intellect. Critical testings of religion whenever possible 
are not to be deplored. Dry leaves and withered 
branches only will be swept by the storm, but the trees 

* Chillingwortlrs Religion of Protestants, p. 133. 



12 REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED. 

of the Lord which are full of sap, the cedars of Lebanon 
which he hath planted — these will remain. Faith in a 
living God, heart trust in Jesus of Nazareth as the 
world's Redeemer, a yearning after eternal verities 
which lie beyond the utmost rim of human vision — 
these will survive the shocks of revolutions, the chaotic 
confusions of transition periods of human thought, and 
will finally prove more attractive to the souls of men 
than the glitter of mammon. There may be times of 
depression ; sore times of mental alienation from God ; 
periods when there shall arise in the soul a sort of re- 
sentment against the universe, when hope comes and 
goes, and self awakes to terrible possibilities of woe ; 
but the fever will go down, the prodigal age will come 
to itself, and, like Goethe's Faust listening to the bells 
of Easter-morn, will sigh for the time when 

Prayer was the ecstasy of bliss. 

" To the Bible," says Matthew Arnold, " will men re- 
turn, because they cannot do without it ; because hap- 
piness is our being's end and aim, and happiness 
belongs to righteousness, and righteousness is revealed 
in the Bible." 

Criticism serves to separate the true from the false, 
the essential from the non-essential. It also builds. 
It was the relentless criticism of pagan worship and 
belief by the early Christians which compelled the 



GENERAL REMARKS. 13 

priest and the philosopher to abandon a religion which 
could neither minister to the conscience nor command 
the respect of sober reason. The great controversies 
which shook all Christendom, such as the Arian, the 
Eutychian, the Sabellian, and the Monophysite, served 
at last but to bring into bolder relief the things which 
were believed from the beginning. The polemics of 
the Reformation find their justification in our own 
day. The various attacks of the English deists in the 
last century called forth the famous Analogy which 
drew even from John Stuart Mill the candid admission 
that " the Christian religion is open to no objection, 
either moral or intellectual, which does not apply at 
least equally to the common theory of deism." What 
a vast literature concerning the life and work of the 
Christ has grown up around us since "West's Treatise 
on the Resurrection of Our Lord (1747), and Sher- 
lock's Trial of the Witnesses (1774) ! Since then the 
rationalists of every school in England and on the 
Continent have exhausted their learning in futile 
efforts to invalidate the gospel record, to destroy the 
credibility of miracles, to relegate the life of Jesus to 
the region of myths, or to mar its uniqueness with the 
rhetoric of sentimentalism. 

But the theories have had their day. The dream- 
ings of Kenan and the less romantic but more effective 
attempts of Schenkel and Strauss have all vanished 



H REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED. 

like the genii in an Eastern tale, before the strong light 
of sober criticism. And now that the smoke has 
cleared away we see the historic Christ of the Gospels 
as never before, and know that we have not followed 
cunningly-devised fables. 



PART FIRST 



OBJECTIONS 



OBJECTIONS. 



CHRISTIAN creeds are rejected (1) by the agnostic 
because he rejects the fundamental truth under- 
lying all religion. (2.) By those who recognize no 
scientific certitude as to church doctrine. (3.) By 
deistical thinkers who deny the divinity of Christian 
teaching. (4.) By a class of semi-Christian thinkers 
who seek to destroy all distinctive dogmas of revela- 
tion ; and finally, not to mention any more, by those 
who regard formulated doctrine as the fallible prod- 
uct of fallible interpreters, and will have no creed 
but the Bible. 



13 HE A SONS EOJi CHURCH CREED. 



SECTION ONE. 



THE first class mentioned rejects formulated belief 
for the same reason which leads him to reject all 
revealed truth ; a denial of a living, personal God, who 
comes into relationship with his creation. The senti- 
ments of the agnostic have been emphasized with such 
dogmatic positi veness by leaders of materialistic thought 
that, were one to accept their statements without inquiry, 
he would think them to be in possession of the secrets of 
the universe. The idea of God, we are told, is a growth 
from fetish worship, and there is no way thinkable by 
which we can ascertain the correctness of our thought. 
That there is a God or something may be true ; that 
there is any evidence of such a being is not true. Na- 
ture has in herself an adequate cause for all things 
visible. For, according to the well-known theory of 
evolution, all organic beings originated in and have 
been developed from one common stock, through the 
continuous operation of the laws of natural selection, 
without any intervention or influence of an overruling 
God. Hence he is unnecessary. 

It is not needful to our present purpose to take part 



OBJECTIONS. 19 

in this controversy. Evolution — that is to say, the 
theistic conception of it — may be the theory of creation; 
some eminent Christian scientists assure us that it is, or 
that at least it is not inconsistent with the most ortho- 
dox theology. But that is not the particular question 
just here. We simply protest against forcing upon us as 
a scientific truth a dogma which, after all that has been 
said upon it for a w r hole generation of thinkers, still 
remains a contested hypothesis. Even Rome, which is 
regarded as the embodiment of spiritual tyranny, would 
hesitate to define a dogma which had been so slightly 
canvassed, or had met with the opposition which the 
materialists' dogma of evolution has encountered 
among Christian scientists. If freedom of thought 
and liberty of the press, if the abasement of ecclesiasti- 
cism through the ascendency of science, has only re- 
sulted in a change of masters for the human intellect, 
it can no longer be said that we have been benefited 
by the change. For though the superstitions of re- 
ligion may have clouded the reason they left undimmed 
the hope of a better life ; but the negations of science 
not only destroy the inspirations of the present, they 
also chill with their icy breath the thought of the 
future. It makes but little difference by whom the 
inquisition is worked ; what we want is that it shall 
not be worked at all. 

Further ; the agnostic may smile at the credulity of 



20 REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED. 

those who believe the creeds of the Church, but what 
dogma of the Church commands belief upon such 
slender grounds as does the faith of the materialist ? 
Those who reject creed, because based on the idea 
of a creator, seem utterly oblivious to their own 
credulity. They fail to comprehend the magnitude of 
the demand they make upon the common sense of man- 
kind when they ask us to believe that this vast uni- 
verse — that even this globe of ours, a sand-grain among 
the immensities, with its myriad forms of life, insects, 
birds, fishes, animals, and man ; its flowers, grasses, 
and trees, with all their tints and gentle bravery of 
color ; its wonderful adaptations of means to ends so 
immeasurably transcending the best efforts of human 
genius ; its enchanting beauty of mountain, hill and 
dale, and prodigality of splendor in the sky — was 
evolved without a God, by blind force, from infinites- 
imal molecules of dead matter ! To the man who has 
this faith nothing shall be impossible. Such a one be- 
lieving the least will really believe the most. He can 
sacrifice his reason on the altar of any fetish ; reject- 
ing an omnipotent God he can deify chemical force ; 
and while descanting on the powers of nature which 
can do such wonderful things make man lament that 
he has life and mind, since he finds himself surpassed 
at every step by forces of matter which have neither 
one nor the other. 



OBJECTIONS. 21 

As tlie first Napoleon once said, " Some men can be- 
lieve every thing but the Bible," and it is not an uncom- 
mon thing to find men who, while scornfully rejecting 
the miracles of the Bible, become fervent believers in 
spirit-rapping and table-turning. History is not with- 
out many pointed illustrations of the fact that when 
one abandons himself to crime in defiance of con- 
science, or in the windy pride of his heart drifts out 
upon an unknown sea of reckless speculation, he be- 
comes either an Islimael in politics and religion or the 
victim of drivelling superstition. 

Louis XI., says Farrar, shrank from no crime, yet 
he reverenced a little leaden image which he carried in 
his cap. Philippe Egalite could not condescend to be- 
lieve in a God, but he could conjure with coffee- 
grounds to discover the future. Lord Herbert could 
not admit the possibility of proof in a matter of reve- 
lation, yet, naturally enough, he sought, and actually 
believed that he had received, for the publication of 
his book De Veritate a sign from heaven. In all this 
there is nothing surprising. Long since Shakespeare 
discerned the fact : 

" For when we in our viciousness grow hard, 

O misery on't, the wise gods seal our eyes ; 

In our own filth drop our clear judgments, make us 

Adore our errors, laugh at us while we strut 

To our confusion." 



22 REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED. 



SECTION TWO. 



THE second class referred to reject the notion of 
creed because, as they say, religion is grounded 
in feeling, and is therefore un verifiable. What is 
wanted is certainty ; but nothing can be certain that is 
not verifiable. " The man of science/' says Professor 
Huxley, u has learned to believe in justification not 
by faith, but by verification." Again, " A belief is 
void of justification unless its subject matter lies within 
the boundaries of possible knowledge, and unless its 
evidence satisfies the condition which experience im- 
poses as a guarantee of credulity."* 

If this canon of the eminent scientist means that 
nothing is worthy of credence but what can be demon- 
strated it is evidently self-destructive, for the canon 
itself cannot be demonstrated. We do not look for 
demonstration in the practical affairs of life, for there 
are many things which we believe on testimony ; nor 
would demonstration make our faith stronger. We 
cannot have demonstration in many sciences, some of 
them the most important, as psychology and polit- 

* Huxley, on Hume, p. 48. 



OBJECTIONS. 23 

ieal economy. Life, with its multiplex influences, 
events and moods, will not surrender to the crucible 
or blow-pipe of the chemist. If, on the other hand, 
the canon means that that only which is reasonable 
and is in conformity with the rational laws of evidence 
shall be admitted within the boundaries of possible 
knowledge, then there can be no longer any objection 
to religion or to creed on such a plea, since religion is 
not unreasonable, but, on the contrary, demands the 
highest exercise of the rational faculties. What re- 
ligion specially seeks is the true, for the true is always 
reasonable, but the reasonable is not always true. It 
is true that a certain event happened ; it may be aston- 
ishing ; it may even awaken doubt, but since it did hap- 
pen it is reasonable whether we can account for it or 
not. On the other hand, it is reasonable — that is, not 
opposed to reason — that a certain animal is in the zoo- 
logical garden, but as a matter of fact it is not there. 
That it is there is reasonable, but that it is there is not 
true. Science, in seeking the true, first seeks the 
reasonable ; and what is reasonable becomes a working 
hypothesis or theory. But there may be other theories 
equally rational of the same fact, and then it may be, 
as it has often been, that while all these theories were 
reasonable none of them were true. A Newton is 
born, and for the first time we think we have the truth. 
AVhat has just been said of physical science may also 



24 REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED. 

be said of philosophy, which, like " Penelope, is for- 
ever weaving and unraveling the same web." " The 
theologian," says Martensen, u confesses himself to be 
in so far a realist that he thinks not for the sake of 
thinking, but for the sake of the truth / he confesses, 
to use Lessing's pertinent simile, that the divine reve- 
lation holds the same relation to his investigations as 
does the answer of an arithmetical problem, given at 
the outset, to the problem itself. Dogmatics, therefore, 
does not make doubt its starting-point, as philosophy is 
often required to do ; it is not developed out of the 
void of skepticism, but out of the fullness of faith," 

Schleirmacher made the feeling the seat of individual 
religion, and since his day, as in the early days of 
Christianity, the truth has been emphasized by the 
Church. But what is this feeling ? It is not emotion, 
an evanescent influence passing over the soul like a 
shadow over a field. It is, as Martensen defines it, in 
the sense of Schliermacher, " a term denoting the most 
immediate contact of consciousness and its object." 
There can be no surer knowledge than this. What 
one is conscious of he knows. Certain facts he must 
ascertain by rational methods ; but religion itself, the 
God-consciousness, comes through the heart — through 
faith, which is the highest exercise of reason. 

Has science any surer ground or better methods ? 
The molecular measurements of Sir William Thomson 



OBJECTIONS. 25 

are accepted by physicists the world over ; yet Pro- 
fessor Tyndall tells us that they are u an exercise of the 
imagination." He tells us, further, that "the kingdom 
of science cometh not by observation and experiment 
alone, but is completed by fixing its roots in a region 
inaccessible to both, and in dealing with which we 
have to fall back upon the picturing power of the 
mind.'" Tins is almost identical with what Pascal says 
of religion. * Again, Mr. Lewes regards atoms as be- 
longing " wholly to the realm of thought, and not to 
reality." Herbert Spencer affirms that u atoms and 
ether, though valuable as working hypotheses, are in- 
conceivable." And all that Professor Tyndall can say 
is that " the existence of this ether is demanded by 
the scientific imagination." 

Still further. Every one knows how uncertain is 
the teaching of science concerning the date when life 
began on this globe. Some say 6,000,000 years were 
sufficient for its development and distribution. Pro- 
fessor Dana figures on 48,000,000 years as the lowest 
number since the beginning of the Silurian deposit 
in Wales. Others yet take 100,000,000 years as 
representative of geologic time, and there are still 
others who ask for thousands of millions. We might 
humbly ask, in view of all these facts, Where is the 

* " Nous connaissons la verite nun senlement par la raison, mais 
encore par le coeur." Pens. J I, 108. 



26 REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED. 

boasted certainty of science, and in what degree does 
it excel religion? 

But it is not to physical science only that un- 
certainty belongs. When we enter the domain of 
philosophy, what systems of thought, what battles 
concerning existence, the certainty of knowledge, 
etc., are called to mind by the mention of such names 
as Des Cartes, Locke, Kant, Hegel, and a host of 
others. And as in philosophy so also in the most 
practical science of political economy, what contests 
are revived by the names of Say, Malthus, Smith, 
Eicardo, Mills and McCulloch. Is this bread-and- 
butter science of political economy a mental or a 
physical study ? If mental, is it a science or an art ? 
or shall it be treated wholly as a science of govern- 
ment ? 

These examples — and many others can be cited — are 
not presented for the purpose of discrediting the 
efforts of conscientious thinkers, but for the simple 
object of showing, without argument, that uncer- 
tainty does not belong wholly to religious subjects. 
The range of the human faculties, though stretching 
toward immensity, is limited. The human judgment 
is fallible. The mists of uncertainty hang over every 
department of human inquiry. 

But to the skeptic who rejects the notion of a creed 
because he thinks its contents are unverifiable it can 



OBJECTIONS. 21 

be shown that the cardinal facts of faith are just as 
certain as the established facts of science. How does 
the scientist reach his conclusions ? By experiment, 
observation, and reasoning. Now it is by these meth- 
ods precisely, with the addition of facts taken from 
human consciousness, that the Christian believer 
reaches his conclusions in the realm of religion. Does 
the scientist experiment ? So do we ; but, like the 
student of political economy, not with the blow-pipe 
and retorts of the laboratory. Each particular science 
lias its own methods of experiment. The methods of 
agriculture cannot be employed in the science of as- 
tronomy. We arrive at a knowledge of God's will by 
doing it, for "He that doeth the will of my Father 
shall know of the doctrine? Does the scientist ob- 
serve all possible conditions and circumstances affect- 
ing the subject of inquiry ? We also ; and as he 
compares his data, and endeavors to ascertain the exact 
relations as to causes and effects, so the searcher after 
divine truth compares, as he must, spiritual things 
with spiritual things ; the facts of human nature as he 
finds them with the corresponding statements of reve- 
lation ; the prophecies of the Old Testament with the 
facts of the New T ; he w^ill reverse his experiments 
when he can, and will apply all through his investiga- 
tions the most rigid laws of evidence, until the whole 
is so presented by every method known to science that 



28 REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED. 

conviction is the result. One step farther in the proc- 
ess of experiment, a complete -surrender to the truth 
thus found, a fulfilling, as the scientist would say, of 
the necessary conditions, and his search is rewarded by 
possession ; he is enabled to know that he has the truth. 
The immediate contact of Him who is the Truth with 
the human consciousness does give a conviction which 
is absolutely final and irresistible. " The Spirit itself 
beareth witness with our spirit that we are the chil- 
dren of God." " He that believeth on the Son hath 
the witness." He foiows that he has passed from death 
unto life, and no phenomenon in nature is more certain 
to him than this same fact of religion which has its 
roots in the human consciousness. Has science any 
tiling surer than this? 'No. 

But let us indicate the method by reasoning. It is 
constantly affirmed that science is based on fact and is 
theref ore within the boundaries of possible knowledge. 
It can be just as easily shown that historical Christian- 
ity, objective religion, is also founded on fact. The 
life of Jesus of Nazareth is before us. It has been 
subjected to the acutest criticism of modern times, a 
period unequaled in the history of thought for intel- 
lectual acumen. Theories of various kinds have been 
tried to account for it ; the severe methods employed 
by historians have all been used by experts in the fields 
of biblical criticism : but the lif e of Jesus is still before 



OBJECTIONS. 2d 

us, and the verdict is that no facts in human history 
are better authenticated than the facts of Christ's life 
as recorded in the four Gospels. The Lord Christ is 
the colossal fact of history. Could we destroy the evi- 
dence supporting this fact no history could stand. 
The history of George Washington, of Napoleon and 
of Caesar would be all of a piece with Sindbad the Sailor 
and the marvels of Baron Munchausen. But it cannot 
be destroyed. Christianity is a fact to-day. In the 
year 750 of Rome it was not, for it was not in exist- 
ence ; but in a hundred years from that date it had 
overrun nearly the whole Roman Empire. " We are 
but of yesterday," said Tertullian (A. D. 193) to the 
rulers of the empire, " and we have filled every place 
among you — cities, islands, fortresses, towns, market- 
places, the very camp, tribes, companies, palace, senate, 
forum ; we have left nothing to you but the temples 
of your gods." * Justin Martyr (A. D. 114) wrote 
earlier : " There is not one single race of men, whether 
barbarians or Greeks or whatever they may be called, 
nomads, or vagrants, or herdsmen living in tents, 
among whom prayers and giving of thanks are not 
offered through the name of the crucified Jesus." f 
Clemens Alexandrinus (A.D. 182?) bears this testimony: 
"The word of our Teacher remained not in Judea 
alone, as philosophy did in Greece ; but it was diffused 

* Apologeticus, c. 37. f Dialogue with Trypho, chap. xvii. 



30 REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED. 

over the whole world." * Similar testimony might be 
quoted from Origen and others, but a word from an 
enemy of Christianity will suffice. Tacitus in his 
Annals, (xv. 44) thus writes of the early Christians : 
" The author of this sect was Christus, who had been 
executed in the time of Tiberius by the Procurator 
Pontius Pilate. This pestilential superstition, checked 
for a while, broke out again, not only through Judea, 
the first seat of the evil, but even through Pome. 
First we arrested those who made no secret of their 
sect, and by this clew a vast multitude (ingens multi- 
tude) of others also." (See also the Letters of Pliny, 
Epistle 91, and the Life of Nero, by Suetonius.) 

How now, on truly scientific principles, shall this 
rapid spread of Christianity be accounted for ? Was 
there any thing real at the bottom of it, or was this 
religion founded upon a mere myth, a legendary story ? 
We will not now turn to other religions, as Brahminism 
or Mohammedanism, for similar examples of growth, 
for, in the first place, there is no comparison between 
Christianity and any other religion in the circumstances 
of their origin ; and, in the second place, what we are 
aiming at is not so much the spread of Christianity, but 
the reason for it. Was Christ really what the Gospels 
say he was and what his disciples preached him, and 
what their immediate converts believed him to be, or 

* See the whole passage in the Stromata, Book VI. 



OBJECTIONS. 31 

was he an ordinary man, afterward idealized and ex- 
alted into legend ? Did his disciples falsify his char- 
acter ? Has Christianity a real Christ as a founder ? 
Remember that those who turned their backs on the 
religion of their ancestors and the altars of their gods 
and embraced the new religion did so with the pros- 
pect of the cruelest death before them. Death by 
crucifixion, by decapitation, by the stake, by divers 
tortures in the arena, was ever before them as the re- 
ward of their boldness. They severed the bonds of 
family love ; they endured ignominy and contempt, 
the fine scorn of the philosopher and the wit of the 
satirist ; they became as the filth and offscouring of 
humanity ; they became dead to the world, to its pleas- 
ures, its honors and its emoluments, and were only too 
glad to seal their faith with their blood. When to 
accept a certain belief is a matter of life or death, 
social ostracism, withering sarcasm and abuse, men do 
not readily accept silly fables. They do not through 
mere sport or obstinacy take every floating theory to 
their bosoms, and, enduring every malignant persecu- 
tion, at last lay down their lives in defense of its truth. 
But these Christians met the contumely of the world 
and its conspiracy of hate with a calmness born of 
certainty, which neither the wisdom of the philosopher 
nor the scorn of the rabble, neither the pleasures of 
life nor the fear of death could overcome. This simple 



32 REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED. 

people without power resisted all powers and drove 
idolatry from the face of the earth.* How was this 
accomplished ? By faith in a poetic myth ? Whatever 
unthinking people may suppose, science demands that 
every effect shall have an adequate cause. When we 
apply this to Christianity, and seek its cause, history 
gives but one answer— Christ Jesus of Nazareth. He 
is the fact upon which Christianity rests. Religion, 
then, is not founded wholly on feeling, but, like a true 
science, may be verified by experiment, observation 
and reasoning. 

Whatever methods science uses for ascertaining 
truth religion also uses, and can and does reach the 
same degree of certitude. If there is uncertainty in 
religion there is also uncertainty in science, for while 
the former may have its sects the latter has its schools. 
But as in science there is no controversy over facts, 
but only on the interpretation of them, so in religion 
there is no division over ground truths, but only in the 
understanding of them. What the earth and the starry 
heavens are to the scientist the Bible is to the believer. 
The facts are there ; it is for us to find them and un- 
derstand them. And as, in the progress of time, 
through the united labors of specialists there is brought 
about a better conception of the facts of nature, old 
views are exchanged for new ones, so in this respect 
* Pascal, Pens. II. 319. 



OBJECTIONS. 83 

also religion keeps pace with her handmaid. " Men's 
thoughts widen with the process of the suns " and by 
the labors of thinkers, the development of Christian 
consciousness, and the events of the world's history, we 
reach new interpretations of old facts. As we climb 
the mountain we leave the mists behind us. 



HE A SOWS FOR CHURCH CREED. 



SECTION THREE. 



THE third class mentioned are those who, while ad- 
mitting the excellency of Christianity, deny its 
divinity, and therefore oppose the right of the Church 
to publish a creed. This class includes several schools 
of modern thought, including those referred to in the 
two previous sections. 

Christianity is considered by such as a resultant of 
the moral and intellectual stragglings of the ages pre- 
ceding its rise. It is, in other words, an evolution of 
the rabbinism of Jerusalem and the philosophy of 
Athens, aided by the Roman idea of universal domin- 
ion. The Lord Jesus was a Jewish rabbi with Gentile 
instincts, who finally fell a victim to sacerdotalism and 
the fierce ignorance of his time. They do not revile 
him, these rationalists ; they patronize him. He is a 
great prophet, perhaps the greatest, but still to be 
named with Gautama, Confucius, and even with Mo- 
hammed. 

It is hardly necessary to attempt a refutation of an 
objection to Christian creed based upon such un- 
scholarly, uncritical grounds. The cont ro versy between 



OBJECTIONS. 35 

Christ and other masters is closed. To open it again 
would be but to traverse once more the dreary wastes 
of comparative religions without any hope of reaching 
conclusions different from those already obtained. No 
human being ever impressed the world like Jesus. He 
wrote nothing, but committed his profoundest intui- 
tion to the immortality of a word. The simple words 
he spoke to the peasants of Galilee, or to the mixed 
multitudes that flocked to him from the cities of Judea, 
have entered into every language of man, and have be- 
come the only authoritative maxims of conduct among 
the most civilized nations. His words bring the same 
consolation, quicken the same hopes in the heart of him 
who dwells in the shadow of the Himalayas as in the 
heart of him who lives and labors in the great cities of 
Europe or America. He knew humanity, its pro- 
foundest needs, its troubles, and its medicine. Yet 
Jesus was not a reformer ; he was not a statesman ; lie 
w r as not a philosopher. Jesus never reasoned. He 
laid down principles. He often illustrated. His con- 
clusions are not the result of philosophic thinking ; they 
are the there fores of absolute knowledge. He knew 
what was in man's heart. The words of weightiest 
wisdom seem as natural to him as the working of 
miracles. More ; he is always greater than his word, as 
in the working of miracles he seems possessed of infin- 
ite reserve of power. Of no other can this be said. He 



36 REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED. 

alone is the Unique. Jesus knew the truth, for he was 
the Truth. The truths which lie uttered, unlike the 
words of any other teacher, have profoundly affected 
the political, social, and moral history of the world. 
If other world-teachers have spoken the same truths 
as Jesus why is it that his alone have changed the cur- 
rent of the world's thought, and, overcoming all barriers 
of climate, oceans, mountains, race, and religion, are 
rapidly becoming the universal faith ? " The words 
that I speak unto you, they are spirit and they are life." 
They cannot be localized ; they bear in themselves uni- 
versality, and whatever they touch they quicken. The 
history of civilization is the history of the acceptance 
of his teachings into the thought and habitudes 
of the nations. 

If we compare Christendom, even in its present im- 
perfect condition, with other great divisions of the 
globe where the teachings of mere philosophers have 
prevailed, we shall be driven to ask, by the condition 
of things, for a rational cause for the difference. 
Wherever in the Orient we look society is steeped in 
superstition and rotten to the very core. It has been 
truly remarked that England's conquest of India was 
India's salvation from political anarchy and the foul 
social corruption which constantly increased, and which 
intellectual speculations on Brahma or Buddha, or 
profitless thinking on Nirwana, were as unable to re- 



OBJECTIONS. 37 

move as they were powerless to resist. Those who 
find satisfaction in degrading Christianity to the level 
of Oriental religions may be referred for practical 
illustrations of the benefit of these religions not only to 
India, but also to those motley nations dominated by 
Mohammedanism and to the teeming millions of China. 
" Ye shall know them by their fruits," says Jesus ; " for 
men do not gather grapes of thorns, nor figs from 
thistles." 

If Christianity is the result of intellectual develop- 
ment, how shall we explain the moral and social con- 
dition of Europe and America as compared with India, 
Turkey, China, and Japan ? Have these nations had 
no development ? If not, the question arises, Why not ? 
If they have, why are they still in the elementary 
stages of every thing pertaining to progress, but have 
sounded the lowest depths of human wretchedness? 
And how shall we explain the progressive civilization 
of Christendom, the enthronement of woman, the value 
of the family, the worth of the individual, the civil 
liberty, and the upward tendency on lines conducive 
to social security and happiness ? The civilizations of 
the East have not fallen into the dry-rot for the lack 
of intellectual vigor. The one fatal lack of the East 
was not intellectual power of the highest order, but 
spiritual power even of the lowest. As with an indi- 
vidual so with a nation. A power which is ever 



38 REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED. 

greater than the man must constantly control him if 
he would be delivered from old habits. Any power or 
truth, spiritual or social, which is not on a higher plane 
than that in which he moves will always fail to exercise 
over him a dominating influence. This is an unchange- 
able law of nature. There is no spontaneous genera- 
tion either in biology, sociology, or theology. The 
lower never rises into the sphere of the higher unless 
the higher, reaching down and imparting something of 
itself to the lower, lifts it into a higher realm. This 
elementary truth of science is so well known and clearly 
understood that it needs no illustration. But the his- 
tory of more than one millennium has proved that the 
teachings of Jesus only are equal to the social uplift 
and continuance of a people. When these are want- 
ing, though it were a nation of philosophers, social de- 
cay is simply a matter of time. Art will not redeem, 
nor will poetry prove stronger than philosophy. Lit- 
erature never made a nation. Some of the most brill- 
iant literary periods have been periods when corrup- 
tion and luxury were eating out the heart of national 
existence. This will hold good even of the Restoration 
in England and of the reign of Louis XIV. in France. 
And if we turn from modern instances in England and 
France and Italy to antiquity, we will find there that 
Greece w^as most corrupt when most philosophic, and 
when her cities and temples were most adorned by the 



OBJECTIONS. 39 

genius of her sculptors. Monuments and columns and 
triumphal arches looked down upon Rome while she 
was seething in debauchery and dominated by fierce 
cruelty ; and this, too, in an age when a Horace and 
a Virgil, a Tacitus and a Livy charmed the ear of the 
world with the harmony of their numbers and the magic 
of their style. The truth is, religion must underlie all 
social development. But a religion which is earth- 
born and earth-bound never can, in the nature of 
things, produce any thing better than itself. It is of 
the earth and tends dustward. 

Christianity infused new blood into the peoples who 
accepted it. The candid historian cannot ignore the 
fact most clear that it was a new force both to the in- 
dividual and the race, and that the civilization of the 
present, in its highest and best aspects, is the direct 
outcome of the teachings of Him who eighteen hun- 
dred years ago sat on the hill-sides of Galilee and gave 
hope to a world grown old in crime and savage in its 
despair. 

The question that confronts us is, How shall we 
account for such a religion ? Or, how shall we ac- 
count for its Founder, the Lord Jesus ? " Who say 
ye that I am ? " is the challenge of Christ to the men 
of this age, as it was to the men of his age. Is he the 
world's Redeemer? Jean Paul Richter calls him 
" the purest of the mighty and the mightiest of the pure, 



40 REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED. 

who, with his pierced hands, raised empires from their 
foundations, turned the stream of history from its old 
channels, and still continues to rule and guide the 
ages." De Wette, who is often quoted by rational- 
ists, calls Jesus " the blameless and sinless one." D. 
F. Strauss, whose destructive work on the life of our 
Lord has been called an epoch-making book, speaks of 
Jesus as " the highest object we can possibly imagine 
with respect to religion ; the Being without whose 
presence in the mind perfect piety is impossible." 
Renan, in addition to many compliments passed on 
Jesus in his Vie de Jesu, affirms in his Etudes d^ Hist. 
Bel. 214, that " Jesus is King forever ; . . . his beauty 
is eternal, his reign shall know no end." Even Theo- 
dore Parker says of him, " He pours out a doctrine as 
beautiful as the light, sublime as heaven, and as true as 
God. The philosophers, the poets, the rabbis — he rises 
above them all." A thick volume might be filled with 
similar testimonies from writers, English, German, and 
French, who, while they offer him a cordial of praise, 
thrust him through with the spear of their criticism. 
But how can Christ be all this if he is not divine ? How 
can he who called himself " the Son of God," who 
thought it not robbery to make himself equal with 
God, who wrought miracles with such infinite ease 
while making these claims, who assumed the preroga- 
tive of the Eternal in forgiving sin — a prerogative 



OBJECTIONS. 41 

never assumed before by the holiest of men in the his- 
tory of this earth — how, we say, can this Being be the 
Sinless One, the one object of adoration for all ages to 
come, the ideal exemplar of the race, the great, the 
good, and the holy, if he was not divine, if lie was not 
what he claimed to be and what his followers declared 
him to be, " The Son of God ? " Is the record true ? 
Did the four evangelists invent this character, a char- 
acter, as Channing said, wholly inexplicable on human 
principles ? Eousseau has given an answer to that. 
Were the disciples imposed upon ? If they were so 
ignorant as to be easily duped, and what they wrote 
was not true, how is it that their ignorance has been 
and still is mightier than the wisdom of earth's 
mightiest philosophers, and that it has surpassed in its 
effects upon the world's destiny the combined power 
of the world's thinkers ? Further ; in a critical study 
of Christianity we must study its conflicts with Juda- 
ism, with the Roman Government, with the schools of 
a philosophic, polished heathenism ; its survival of the 
dismemberment of the Roman Empire, its conquest of 
Teutonic nations ; its conflicts with heresies within its 
own fold ; its astonishing vitality to resist the influ- 
ence of the shameful lives of many professing to be 
guided by its precepts — shameful enough to crush any 
religion that lacked a divine origin ; its survival of the 
revolutions of thought following the revival of learn- 



4 2 REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED. 

ing and its sublime triumph over all other religions 
which it fairly encounters in its march around the 
globe. Volumes would be necessary to tell the story 
of Christian conflict with world powers ; it cannot be 
even outlined here ; this is not the place, nor is it re- 
quired. After all, argument does not make the Chris- 
tian. All the evidences and apologies that professors 
and doctors might write from now till the crack of 
doom would be powerless to convert the heart, what- 
ever they might do in convincing the head. The 
argument for religion is religion — that is, an actual 
experience of the grace of God. A holy life is un- 
answerable logic. Let the honest unbeliever who 
would be convinced look at those who are truly Chris- 
tian, not at those who are merely baptized heathens, 
whose life is a travesty of the holy name of Jesus — 
believers in theory, infidels in practice ; for such are 
not Christians any more than a Judas is a John. Look 
rather at those whose life is a song in the night and 
full of a divine sweetness ; whose souls, while resting in 
the infinite peace of Jesus, are yet throbbing with a 
holy passion for humanity — men and women who, 
while toiling in life's dusty highways, like the thou- 
sands around them, subject to like sorrows, anxieties, 
and temptations, yet bravely endure, and not only 
wear "the white flower of a blameless life," as a mor- 
alist might, but become in themselves rousing inspira- 



OBJECTIONS. 43 

tions to duty and self-sacrifice — pillars of fire and 
clouds of smoke to all who wander in the wilderness 
of to-day. They may know nothing of the philosophy 
of the schools ; they may know but little of the great 
world's history ; but they know what sin is, and they 
know what redemption is ; and that is the highest 
philosophy and the sum of all history. Let the 
honest skeptic look at these holy ones and account for 
them if he can. If one should think that these owe 
something to the moral influences of culture let him 
turn to the once lowest specimens of humanity and 
see what this religion has done for them. In the year 
1832 Darwin, the celebrated naturalist, sailed round 
the world in the ship Beagle. He called at Terra del 
Fuego, in South America. His description of the 
people, as given in his diary, is horrible in the ex- 
treme ; in the whole world he had not seen such 
people. They were savages of the most depraved 
type, terrible and bloodthirsty, with habits not to be 
described in human language. No one of the ship 
dare remain among them, and the great scientist Dar- 
Avin turned away believing them to be wholly inca- 
pable of civilization. After a while a missionary 
faced the danger. He went among them with the 
Gospel of Jesus and remained with them, learned 
their wretched sounds, translated the gospel story of 
Christ's life for them, and taught them to read it. By 



44 REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED, 

and by they began to understand it, and it melted 
their hearts and transformed their lives and civilized 
them. One may go among them now ; there is no 
danger. When Darwin knew of the marvelous change 
that had been wrought he, grand soul that he was, be- 
came a subscriber to missions through which the work 
had been done. "What changed this savage people? 
Not philosophy, not rationalism, but the religion of 
the Lord Jesus Christ ; the love of God shed abroad in 
their hearts through the preaching of definite truth. 



OBJECTIONS. 45 



SECTION FOUR. 



OPPOSITION to a summary of Christian belief 
is made by others who, while not formally repu- 
diating the whole of Christian teaching, desire, never- 
theless, to so soften down its distinctive facts as to 
make them of no peculiar force in the world's thought 
and life. Music and art, and other refining influences 
possible in an age of culture, are to be considered as 
equally important as " fossilized dogmas." Man, it is 
assumed, only needs a liberal education to bring him 
into harmony with his environments. A due appre- 
ciation of himself will teach him his duty to society, 
and this is the most that morality or religion can justly 
demand. Now this may be a refined paganism, but it 
is not Christianity. Balaam may build altars and go 
through with his incantations, but what is primarily 
needed is not altars and flowers and criticisms on the 
latest book, but the message of the living God. 

Others in this same class, but more Christian in their 
sentiment, will hear of nothing but religion, whatever 
that may mean in their crude and indefinite way of 
thinking. There must be no Theology, no Christology, 



46 REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED. 

no Escliatology. Of .these tilings we are supposed to 
know nothing; certainly, and Christian Agnosticism be- 

comes the best creed. Life, duty, conduct, and not 
doctrine, should be preached. Kow this may be moral- 
ity, but it is not Christianity. If the doctrines of relig- 
ion are to be ignored instead of being made the founda- 
tion of life and duty, then the Epistles of Seneca, the 
Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius, and the ethical writings 
of other philosophers, may be placed on the same shelf 
with the Holy Scriptures — we are no longer Christians 
but moralists. Then, again, does it make no difference 
what one believes ? Has belief no influence upon con- 
duct ? Did Voltaire's belief, Rousseau's, Paine's, Caesar 
Borgia's, Wesley's, Xavier's, Jonathan Edwards's, have 
no connection with their conduct ? To deny this is 
but saying that a man is no more responsible for his 
belief than he is for physiognomy, he being the vic- 
tim of uncontrollable circumstances. But this is fatal- 
ism, and utterly destroys moral accountability, the last 
dogmatic utterance of the thorough-going materialist. 

The misguided Church that rejoices in its deliver- 
ance from dogma and creed will inevitably discover 
that its existence in this world is by no means a neces- 
sity. Its services will be nothing but an emphasis of the 
individual called a minister, and its message to a world 
of sin and misery nothing but an idle whistle. Others 
in this class may object to creed because its accuracy 



OBJECTIONS. 47 

depends upon the fallible judgment of fallible theolo- 
gians. It is true that the expressions employed to 
express the dogmatic idea depend on the framers of a 
creed, but the dogma is a matter of revelation, and if 
not accurately expressed, because, perhaps, not accu- 
rately understood, the growth of scriptural knowledge 
in the Church under the guidance of the Holy Ghost 
will nullify the inaccuracy. Then, the facts of science 
as presented to us depend upon the fallible judgment 
of scientists. And if to this one should reply that any 
competent person can verify these facts for himself, so 
also may any one verify the facts of the creed himself ; 
for the word of God is the rule of faith, and to that 
must a true creed correspond. Again, the historic 
conception of the universal Church of any particular 
doctrine is much more likely to be correct than the 
opinion of a single individual. What has always and 
every-where and by all Christians been accepted as 
the correct teaching of Scripture ought not to be lightly 
esteemed by any one who, while denying infallibility to 
pope and councils, practically attributes that same in- 
fallibility to his own conception of biblical doctrine. 

Finally, Christian summary of belief is rejected by 
many pious Christians who think that a creed super- 
sedes the Scriptures, causes divisions in the Church, and 
is opposed to Christian liberty. To the first allegation 
this may be said — that no creed is ever placed even on 



43 REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED. 

the same level with the word of God. The Bible is 
the standard, the creed is the Church's belief as to 
what that standard teaches. As to the second objec- 
tion, it is a matter of history that Churches without 
creeds have been rent by doctrinal dissensions, as well 
as those that have had confessions of faith. And con- 
cerning the third reason, namely, that creeds limit 
Christian liberty, it must be frankly stated that the 
only business of a church is to bear witness to the 
truth as it understands it from God's holy word. The 
individual must accommodate himself to the truth, and 
not the truth to the individual. No man's liberty is 
infringed. If he cannot accept one form he is at lib- 
erty to go elsewhere in his search for what he thinks 
is the true form. Nor does a creed preclude progress 
in Christian thought. The doctrines of Scripture are 
settled, but progress in apprehending them in their 
fullness and in their relations to each other is a fact 
clear in the history of the Church from the beginning. 
Every argument, then, that militates against a creed as 
being opposed to progress is also an argument against 
a settled doctrine of Scripture. 

Notwithstanding, there are those who will have no 
creed but the Bible. They emphasize this in such a 
manner that one would think all other Christians had 
neglected the Bible. But, like many other catch- words, 
this party cry will not bear analysis. Set forth God 



OBJECTIONS. 40 

to the people, we arc exhorted. Good. But what hind 
of a God? The impersonal God of the Pantheist, or 
the inscrutable Power of the agnostic, or the Lord 
God of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures? What 
do we know about God, and what shall we teach the 
people concerning him ? If we are afraid to put into 
succinct form, understandable of the people, what we 
have learned of God's nature and character, lest we 
be mistaken in our creed, why preach at all ? Again, 
we are told to preach Christ. But here, again, the ques- 
tion arises, what hind of a Christ ? Shall he be the 
Christ of Strauss, of Penan, of Theodore Parker, or 
the Christ of the Gospels ? It must be evident to all 
that if we are to have a Christ we cannot avoid a Christ- 
olofirv, some definite word about that Christ. An un- 
defined Christ is no real Christ to the Christian mind ; 
he is but an idea, or a mere sentiment. We might ask 
similar questions as to what this Bible is, involving the 
question of inspiration, and of many or all the doc- 
trines taught in the Bible. Moreover, in the theolog- 
ical schools of a no-creed Church the doctrines of 
Scripture as understood by that Church, and the pe- 
culiar forms of Church government as accepted by 
that Church, are taught to young ministers who, in 
turn, teach these same things to the people, deluding 
themselves in the meantime with the notion that their 

Church has no creed. The position is untenable. To 
4 



50 REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED. 

assume that a Church has no creed because it lias no 
published belief, while that Church at the same time 
preaches a creed peculiar to itself, is extremely illogical. 
No Church in Christendom has in its creed all that it 
believes and teaches. The great truths of our holy 
religion which have been controverted, or those truths 
which, may serve to indicate the true from the false, 
alone are published that the world in the midst of 
doubt might know the body of truth held by the 
Church and the cardinal facts around which her teach- 
ing moves. A Church without a creed is a government 
without a constitution. 



PART SECOND. 



REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED, 



REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED. 



SECTION ONE. 



IN passing from the negative to the positive side 
of this subject it will not be necessary to prove a 
simple proposition of this nature, namely, that in the 
constitution of the Church there lies an inherent neces- 
sity for formulated beliefs. Every organization, moral, 
political, or scientific, has some ultimate object in 
view as a reason for its existence. This object rests 
upon certain beliefs, principles, or opinions, and when 
these cease to exist, or to be no longer worth contend- 
ing for, the society loses its reasons for further organ- 
ized effort. If this statement be accepted it will be 
seen that the Church has a right to declare her belief, 
and also to demand of every one seeking admission to 
her fold an honest acceptance, as far as he is able, of 
those principles for the promulgation of which she was 
called into existence. 

The Church is not a social club ; not a coterie ; not a 
scientific association ; not an institution for the develop- 
ment of religious estheticism. The Church is the visi- 



54 REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED. 

ble, living organ of divine truth in the world. To her 
have been committed the oracles of God. It is her 
office to interpret the word to the salvation of the im- 
penitent and the edification of believers. The apos- 
tle Paul condemned teaching any thing contrary to 
" the doctrine which is according to godliness" — that is, 
the true religion ; and he exhorts Timothy to keep that 
which was committed to his trust. In the second 
epistle to Timothy the apostle writes, " And the things 
which thou hast heard from me among (via, through) 
many witnesses, the same commit thou to faithful 
men, who shall be able (competent) to teach others also " 
(chap. 2, v. 2). In the same epistle (chap. 1) he ex- 
horts Timothy not to be ashamed of u the testimony of 
our Lord," but to " hold fast the form (the pattern, 
outline) of sound words, which thou hast heard of 
me, in faith and love which is in Christ Jesus. That 
good thing (trust, deposit) which was committed unto 
thee, keep by the Holy Ghost which dwelleth in us." 
Finally he exhorts him, " I charge thee in the sight of 
God and of Christ Jesus, who shall judge the quick 
and the dead, and by his appearing and his kingdom, 
preach the word (the doctrine), reprove, rebuke, ex- 
hort with all long-suffering and teaching. For the 
time will come when they will not endure the sound 
doctrine." In the Epistle to Titus one of the qualifi- 
cations of a bishop, or presbyter, is that he hold fast 



REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED. 55 

the faithful word (that is, the word or doctrine of faith) 
as he hath been taught, that he may be able by sound 
doctrine both to exhort and convince the gainsayers." 
This is the same as the instructions to Timothy, show- 
ing a settled purpose and method on the part of the 
apostle. Nor was this peculiar to him. Peter, in his 
first general epistle, says, " If any man speak, let him 
speak as the oracles of God." In the second general 
epistle he speaks of a " more sure word of prophecy," 
and then immediately passes to the opposers of it, 
" False prophets among you who shall bring in dam- 
nable heresies." 

We cannot read these stern admonitions, and many 
more like them, and deny that the first Christians pos- 
sessed any regular form of doctrine. Nor will it suf- 
fice to say that by " sound words," " that good thing," 
and similar expressions, the " Gospel " is meant. To 
take refuge in that one word is to stick one's head in 
the sand. The word Gospel contains in itself the 
doctrines of Christ and his apostles. These doctrines 
are the Gospel. When the apostles preached the Gos- 
pel they preached certain facts, certain great and fun- 
damental truths, and these are the sound words, the 
sure word of prophecy, and the good thing committed 
to faithful men for the instruction of others. The line 
between the true and the false, between that which was 
committed to the Churches in the person of their min- 



56 REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED. 

isters, and that which the unknowing and unstable did 
wrest out of the oral and epistolary teachings of the 
apostles, was most clearly marked. The messengers 
of St. Paul, who carried his letters to the various 
Churches, found no variant creeds. The apostolic in- 
structions to Timothy and Titus were the same, and 
the purpose must have been uniformity of faith and 
practice. There was one Lord, one faith, one baptism. 
And this oneness of essential faith continued even after 
the apostles had passed away, so that Tertullian could 
say to his opponent, " Run through the apostolic 
churches in which the very seats in which the apostles 
sat are now filled ; where their authentic epistles are 
read, conveying the sound of their voices and the rep- 
resentation of their person. Is Achaia near you ? 
You have Corinth. If you are not far from Macedonia 
you have Philippi ; you have the Thessalonians. If 
you can pass over to Asia you have Ephesus ; but if 
you are near Italy you have Rome." So it is, the Church 
held certain great truths which were committed to her, 
and any deviation from them was immediately recog- 
nized as " another gospel ; " and thus it was that 
Irenaeus, Bishop of Lyons, A. D. 177, in w T riting to 
Florinus, who had embraced strange doctrines, could 
say, " These doctrines were never delivered to thee by 
the presbyters before us, those who also were the imme- 
diate disciples of the apostles." 



REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED. 57 

It is not necessary to hazard the statement that the 
apostolic Church arranged these principal truths in ar- 
ticulated form, as was afterward done by church coun- 
cils. Not till the Council of Nice, A. D. 325, was 
there a creed universally accepted without variation. 
But at no time from the days of the apostles was the 
Church without a formula of faith. The formula 
varied slightly in the different principal churches, as 
those of Jerusalem, Cesarea, Antioch, Alexandria, etc., 
but the substance in all was the same. Besides these 
we have the confessions of faith of the earliest fathers, 
some of these reaching back to the days of the apostles; 
and the agreement in the princijjal doctrines confessed 
is strong proof that such doctrines, such summaries of 
faith, composed the body of truth held by the imme- 
diate converts of the apostles. This is not equivalent 
to saying that the apostles formulated a creed. Prin- 
cipal Tulloch thinks such an opinion (that they did) 
questionable, if not destructive to the apostolic origin 
of the New Testament epistles. Nevertheless it must 
not be supposed that the primitive Christians had no 
distinctive heads of doctrine, which we are inclined to 
think were practically articles of faith. The apostle 
Paul speaks of the " doctrine of Christ ... of the doc- 
trines of baptisms, and of laying on of hands, and of 
resurrection from the dead, and of eternal judgments." 
It cannot be denied that the baptismal formula was a 



58 REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED. 

creed. Then, again, there was a standard of divine 
truth from which the Galatians were foolishly be- 
witched ; there was a doctrine held by the Church at 
Ephesus, when Timothy remained there that he " might 
charge some that they preach no other doctrine ; " there 
was a difference between the standard of faith of the 
Church and the opinions of Hymeneas and Alexan- 
der ; there was something to be preserved when the 
apostle commanded that " a man that is a heretic after 
the first and second admonition reject; " and, finally, 
there was a reason for Jude to write in his general 
epistle, " Beloved, when I gave all diligence to write 
unto you of the common salvation, it was needful for 
me to write you that ye should earnestly contend for 
the faith which was once delivered to the saints." The 
Church is the custodian of a faith, which faith, con- 
sidered as a general term, comprises many particular 
facts or doctrines which are articles of creed. These 
facts do not lie in systematic order in the sacred vol- 
ume — from the fact that it is not a treatise on syste- 
matic divinity, but an un arranged repository of truth. 
But the Church must arrange, or rather bring into 
clear view, the great essential truths contained in the 
volume if it would have, as God wills it to have, a 
clear conception of the whole revealed will and pur- 
poses of God, and if it would accomplish its mission 
in teaching the nations. 



REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED. 59 



SECTION TWO. 



11HE Church is not only the depository of the faith, 
she is also a teaching body. She is the only 
divinely designated and commissioned teacher of rev- 
elation in the world. The State has no authority to 
teach, nor can it in any form assume the office of re- 
ligious teacher without usurping the authority of the 
Church. The commission of the Church is found in 
the words of her Founder at his ascension : " And 
Jesus came and spake unto them (the disciples), say- 
ing, All power is given unto me in heaven and in 
earth. Go ye therefore, and teach (disciple) all nations, 
baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the 
Son, and of the Holy Ghost ; teaching them to observe 
all things whatsoever I have commanded you : and, lo, 
I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world." 
(Matt, xxviii, 18-20.) Having received the faith the 
impulse of that faith is to proclaim itself, to extend 
blessing and peace to all men. The function of the 
Church, then, is to teach men the way of life, to lead 
the nations from gross darkness and from under the 
dominion of Satan into the light of God, and into fel- 
lowship with the Father through his Son Jesus Christ. 



60 REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED. 

Now if the Church teaches she must have some- 
thing to teach ; and if this teaching is to be of any 
value it must be definite. There can be no teacliius: 
if that which is to be taught is indefinite. All glib 
talk about preaching " the Bible" is positively offen- 
sive in its hollo wness unless we mean something partic- 
ular, something definite about that Bible. An abstract 
Bible is no Bible at all. It is a mere sound, and signi- 
fies nothing. If the doctrine of God's being and 
attributes is indefinite, if nothing particular and posi- 
tive can be affirmed of it, then nothing can be taught 
respecting that dogma ; and so of all other dogmas. 

It is evident, then, that, like all other teaching bodies 
in this respect, the Church must give form to the 
truths committed to her care. But if she gives form 
to her teaching it becomes formulated or dogmatic 
truth, the heads of which constitute her belief or creed. 
To criticise the Church for having dogmatic creed is 
in reality a condemnation of the commission given to 
her by her divine Lord. It is to condemn the dog- 
matic preaching of the apostle Peter on the day of 
Pentecost, and the no less dogmatic teaching of Paul 
in all his epistles and in his proclamation of the Chris- 
tian belief on Mars' Hill. 

The Church, professing to be a scriptural, apostolic 
Church cannot be other than dogmatic. The Christian 
doctrine is a doctrine not of theories and hypotheses, 



REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED. Gl 

not of human opinions or judgments drawn from the 
moral history of the race, but of facts and absolute 
truths which admit of no doubt and do not appeal 
primarily to reason, but to faith. "The words which 
thou gavest me I have given them" said our Lord, 
speaking of the revelation which he had from the 
Father. If one should ask that these words stand or 
fall by the judgment of a human tribunal the question 
arises, What kind of a tribunal and of what age of the 
world shall this tribunal be ? We would not be con- 
tent to have savages compose that court, nor would we 
want any other than this age to be the period. But the 
twentieth century might object to our age and to our 
selection of judges, and succeeding ages might object 
to the conclusions of the twentieth century. The idea 
is absurd. M. Renan, in his Life of Jesus, fell head- 
long into this yawning pit. " Miracles," he wrote, 
" are not performed in the places where they ought 
to be. One single miracle performed in Paris before 
competent judges would forever settle so many 
doubts ! " Who would be competent judges ? The 
French Academy, with all its professors of physiology 
and physics ? This would be perhaps the most com- 
petent body ; but this same competent company once 
resisted vaccination ; also the use of quinine ; they also 
decided against the existence of meteorolites, against 
the use of lightning-rods, and, like the famous En- 



62 .REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED. 

glisli , scientist, Lardner, declared against the steam- 
engine. 

The dogmas of the Church, not the interpretation 
of them, cannot stand or fall at the bar of human rea- 
son. They are revelations from God, and can neither 
be changed nor added to, for the revelation is com- 
plete. If the Scriptures teach the incarnation of the 
Only Begotten, the Church cannot reduce the doctrine 
to a mere inhabitation of the human Jesus by the 
Logos ; if the holy word teaches reconciliation through 
the atonement, or final rewards and punishments, the 
Church must present such doctrines, though exact 
words, such as, for instance, God-man, trinity, etc., are 
not found in the sacred text. The Church must be nec- 
essarily dogmatic in this, for she cannot go to the world 
without definite truth, as did that typical agnostic, 
Ahimaaz, who outran the courier but had nothing to 
tell the anxiously- waiting king. A disappointed world 
would say, as David said to the swift-footed know- 
nothing, " Turn aside and stand still ! " Her dogma 
is her message, and with this she has conquered and 
does conquer. It was the great dogmatist, Paul, the 
slave of Jesus Christ, who turned the Gentiles from 
the service of idols unto the living God ; and it has 
only been through the genuine practical teaching of 
dogmatic truth that the Church has ever gained a last- 
ing victory. Kings and emperors and great ones of 



REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED. 63 

earth aided her when she had become a power, but it 
is to the plain preaching of divine truth as expressed 
in her formularies and believed in by her ministers, 
and not to intellectual prowess, nor to philosophical 
wisdom, nor to the patronage of the great, nor to 
general indefiniteness, incoherency and confusion of 
teaching, that Christianity owes her victories over the 
nations. She affirms that the Scriptures contain the 
doctrines which she teaches as matters of faith — the 
fatherhood of God ; the divinity of the Lord Jesus ; 
the atonement through Christ for the sins of the whole 
world ; the depravity of human nature ; regeneration 
by the Holy Ghost ; blessedness for the penitent ; an- 
guish and woe for the finally impenitent. To deny or 
ignore any one of them is to destroy the contents of 
the Gospel. If we deny the divinity of Christ we de- 
stroy at the same time the efficacy of the atonement. 
Instead of being a sacrifice for the sins of the world 
it becomes an example of holy martyrdom; not a 
shedding of blood for the remission of sins, but a les- 
son of loyalty, perhaps, to the truth and obedience to 
civil authority. For if not divine, then Christ is a 
dependent creature, and can no more reconcile us by 
his death to the God of justice than could Peter, James 
or John. Again, deny the depravity of the heart, 
and not only is the necessity of the atonement doubtful, 
but also the fact of the new birth. And further, deny 



G4 REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED. 

the doctrine of the Trinity, and the doctrine of the 
new birth falls with it ; for if there is no Trinity there 
is no Holy Ghost, and so no Regenerator and Saneti- 
iier of all who repent and believe. Every doctrine is 
a keystone in the arch of truth ; pull one out and the 
whole arch falls. Should the Church in a spasm of 
admiration for, or rather of surrender to, the spirit of 
modern speculation go before the world saying in a 
compromising manner, " There have been many nota- 
ble characters in history eminent for virtue and intel- 
lectual ability who doubted these truths," "It is 
possible for men to be sincere in their antagonism to 
these doctrines and yet be saved," what possible rea- 
son could she give for impressing these doctrines on 
the souls of the millions who are not eminent for vir- 
tue and intellectual ability ? Should the Church prove 
recreant to "the faith once delivered to the saints" 
and say to a world seething in sin and woe, " It is not 
certain what Christ was ; not certain that he rose from 
the dead ; not certain that there is a Holy Ghost who 
regenerates the hearts of men ; not certain that there 
is an irreversible judgment for all who reject the 
Christ " — in one word, that the whole system of teaching 
of the Old and New Testaments is probably uncer- 
tain — and what possible reason could she give for her 
existence ? On what plea could she build churches, 
make calls for millions of money or go through the 



REASON'S FOR CHURCH CREED. 65 

farce of sending missionaries to the heathen ? Does 
the certainty of the doctrines of Christianity depend 
upon who occupies a professor's chair in a German 
university ? 

It was not a doubtful message that Paul carried to 
Athens or to Corinth or to Ephesus or to imperial 
Rome. He did not simply tell the philosophers at 
Athens or the Christians at Koine they must be pious 
and humane, good singers and cultivators of esthetic 
worship. The mighty dogmatic facts of human sin- 
fulness and of man's need of an Almighty Saviour, and 
of the necessity of the power of God's Spirit in chang- 
ing human character, making the individual meet for 
adoption into the family of God, were the facts which 
he preached and with which he filled his epistles. It 
was not a doubtful message that converted the great 
Germanic nations of Europe, and in modern times has 
turned savage tribes and barbarous peoples to the true 
and living God. 

Finally, in sustaining its position as a teaching body, 
the Church protects herself from all inroads of heresy. 
Its ministers are scattered throughout the globe ; they 
differ in talents, in breadth of culture, in knowledge 
of divine things, and minister to congregations as 
varied as humanity. Shall these ministers teach the 
same things, or shall each one, irrespective of his abil- 
ity, constitute himself an authority in matters pertain- 



66 REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED. 

ing to the eternal welfare of his people and the peace 
of society ? If each one should be allowed to formu- 
late doctrines of his own devising, having a Bible 
proof for them, as he would suppose (every heresy in 
the Church grounding itself in Scripture), it is clear 
that soon the " faith once delivered" would be sub- 
merged under individual opinions. The conflict of no- 
tions would end in a chaos of religion not to be dis- 
tinguished from that rationalism which borders on the 
crudest deism. But a church that has a standard of 
belief reflecting the teachings of God's word knows 
that its ministers teach the same thing, and the people 
are not distracted by clashing doctrines. Should a 
minister presume to teach contrary to the doctrines of 
such a church while occupying its pulpit, the people 
would know that he was acting in bad faith ; that he 
w r as subverting the peace of his people ; and would be 
in a position to protect themselves from his individ- 
ualism. Thus does the Church preserve itself while 
obeying the command of its Lord to teach all nations, 
teaching them to observe all things which to it have 
been delivered. 



REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED. 67 



SECTION THREE. 



IN considering the necessity for formulated belief in 
the Church we cannot ignore the relation of creed 
to life. Such an idea may seem strange just at this 
time, when it is the fashion to assume that creed is a 
thing of the past and that religion consists in mere 
enthusiasm or ecstatic enjoyment. But religion does 
not mean emotion. It means obedience to the truth. 
Joy in the Lord is the blessed privilege of the believer, 
but it must have its ground in loyalty of life to the 
commandments of the God of all comfort. To remain 
willfully ignorant of the facts of revelation, to care 
little or nothing for these facts in their bearing on 
Christian life and character, is to reduce religion to a 
question of cold, passionless morality, or else to one of 
mere emotion. The former is not Christianity. The 
latter opens the flood-gates to all kinds of vagaries in 
religion, impressions, visions, and revelations. In 
nearly every community, perhaps, Churches have 
been, at some time in their history, distracted, and in 
many instances torn asunder by people who, giving 
their imagination unbridled license, become a law unto 



QS REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED. 

themselves, reject all authority of Church in matters 
of discipline, means of grace, etc., and think themselves 
superior to the ordinary ministry of the word. The 
end of such is often painful ; for, having cut loose 
from all moorings, they drift out into the shoreless 
without compass or chart except their own feelings 
and idiosyncrasies, and are finally wrecked in their be- 
lief or settle down in the quicksands of indifferentism. 

Another evil resulting from a separation of belief 
or creed — in the wide sense in which we have been 
using it — from life is the free and easy attitude which 
it is liable to cultivate in unsettled members toward 
their Church and all Churches. Not bound by any 
principle of belief to any Church they become a prey, 
rather a feather blown about by every wind of doc- 
trine. Having been taught no settled principles they 
wander from Church to Church and subsist on what 
for the time may be pleasant to " itching ears ; " or, 
like the Arab who remains in one place till the grass 
is eaten up, they settle for the time being where they 
may receive the most social attention or reap the bene- 
fits of trade. Such people will pervert the growing 
sentiment of fraternity among Christians and interpret 
charity by carelessness, thinking that a desire for 
unity is synonymous with disregard for distinctively 
fundamental truths. 

Church creed cannot make Christian character, nor, 



REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED. 09 

if we think of it rightly, can even the holy word of 
God. The formation of Christian character is the 
prerogative of the Holy Ghost. Bible truths, teach- 
ings of Jesus, and apostolic exhortations and doctrines 
are all used, and the only things that are used, by the 
Holy Spirit in the education of the believer. "He 
shall glorify me, for he shall receive of mine and shall 
show it unto you." But while creed cannot make 
character it can shape it and regulate it, and so pre- 
vent it from excessively abnormal tendencies. The 
Christian wdio may think himself superior to all exte- 
rior helps and influences, believing himself to be under 
the immediate guidance of the Holy Spirit — by which 
he means the impulse of impressions and vague feel- 
ings, now moving him in this direction and now in 
that — is, notwithstanding his protestations, practically 
on the same plane with the half -infidel believer wdio 
excuses his barrenness of character with the couplet : 

"For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight, 
His can't be wrong whose life is in the right." 

Christian character is not based on the maxims of 
philosophy, nor is it rooted in the soil of pagan 
morality, however pure, but in the doctrine of revela- 
tion. The soul that is nourished on the morality of 
paganism may attain to the grand stoicism of a Seneca, 
an Epictetus, or a Marcus Aurelius, but it never can 



70 REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED. 

rise to the serene heights where the lowliest Christian 
stands. Among all the lofty names of paganism there 
is not one that can be called holy. The poor negro 
mother sitting in the darkness of her lonely cabin, 
soothing her sorrow with her faith and singing in sad 

tone, 

"Nobody knows the sorrows I've seen, 
Nobody knows but Jesus,' ' 

has more of God in her soul and is sublimer far in 
the character of her religion than any philosopher that 
ever gave luster to the moral schools of Greece or 
Rome or sat on the throne of the Caesars. 

There is a vast difference between the man who 
really believes that the eternal Son of God took flesh 
and dwelt among us and the man who trims that doc- 
trine dowm to his own narrow r comprehension ; between 
the man wdio believes in the forgiveness of sin through 
Christ dying as " the just for the unjust " and the 
man who looks at the atonement as a moral example ; 
between the man who believes in the regeneration and 
sanctification through the Holy Ghost and the man 
who doubts the personality of the Spirit, or who by 
the influence of false philosophy asserts that the im- 
mediate contact of the Holy Spirit with our spirits is 
wholly impossible. Both may be Christians, but one 
will be like a plant grown in a cellar, sickly and fruit- 
less from the lack of the cheerful light of day ; the 



REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED. n 

other shall be like "a tree planted by the rivers of 
water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season," 
ever green ; for its roots are nourished in the waters 
and its boughs warmed by the shining of the sun. 
Such is the connection between dogma and life that 
if the former is ignored the latter soon vanishes or 
becomes a sickly shadow of its former self. The Piet- 
ism of Germany considered dogma superfluous, but 
the Rationalism which increased soon drove the Church 
back to the study of the reasons for her faith. 

Leaving the question of the relation between creed 
and conduct in the individual, we may notice briefly 
the same question with reference to a local church. A 
local church is composed of faithful people. If so, 
there must be something held in common by all hav- 
ing membership in that church. This must be true 
now as on the day of Pentecost. But the only things, 
religiously, that must be held in common are the fun- 
damental doctrines of revelation. Should a number of 
men call themselves a church, but reject the doctrines, 
they would not be a church, but an ethical society. 
They could not expect the blessings of the Holy Ghost, 
nor could they hardly dare to ask for any thing necessary 
to the growth influence and saving power of a church. 

Again, a scriptural creed is a connecting power not 
supplied, when lacking, by any thing else. In the pul- 
pits of Christendom in almost every community there 



72 REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED. 

are godly ministers of rare attractive qualities of mind 
and soul. Refined, intellectual, sociable, world-know- 
ing, they wield immense power, and especially so when 
this cultured repose, fine intellectualism, and varied 
knowledge of men and things are heightened and 
adorned with the beauty of a pure life. It cannot be de- 
nied that many are drawn into the churches by this sweet 
magnetism of such a pastor, and rightly so — blessed is 
the man of God thus gifted and honored — but they 
stop short too often of the true union with that church. 
They join the pastor instead of joining the church, 
just as some others join the church, but fail to unite 
with Christ. A church thus founded and built up is 
nothing but a rope of sand. Men who are bound 
together in a grand undertaking by glorious principles 
which root themselves in the heart and life will main- 
tain their endeavor when a leader falls, nor will they 
desert their cause when days of sadness and disaster 
come. A church bound by the doctrines of the Lord 
Jesus Christ will not be dependent upon the suavity 
of a pastor, but on the conviction that it is set for a 
witness of the truth. The continuity of a church is 
thus preserved ; its life is not measured by the popu- 
larity of its minister, but by its devotion to principle, 
which, in such a case, can be no other than the faith 
once delivered to the saints. A church the opposite 
of this is a bodv without bones. 



REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED. 73 

Had the early Christians rallied around an individual, 
rather than around the faith committed to them by the 
apostles, Christianity would have sunk under the fury 
of its persecutors ; nor would a falling back on the 
belief of Christ's presence have saved it, any more than 
the belief of the Jew^s that God would suddenly come 
to his temple saved that glorious building when it was 
attacked by Titus at the siege of Jerusalem. Whether 
a church or an individual shall abide in the truth ; 
whether either shall have a true Christian character ; 
whether they shall continue or gradually pine aw r ay 
and finally vanish, depends on what they believe and 
how they believe. 



74 REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED. 



SECTION FOUR. 



THE closing thoughts in the preceding section lead 
us to the final reason we shall touch upon for the 
use of and the perpetuity of the Church. That the per- 
petuity of Christ's Church has any intimate connec- 
tion with the promulgation or existence of creed will 
probably shock many unless they look into the question 
earnestly. It will be assumed that the guarantee of 
the Church's continued existence is in the promise of 
Christ — that the gates of hell shall not prevail against 
his Church. This is freely granted. But are there no 
conditions back of this promise ? Rejecting antinom- 
ianism in the religious or ethical life of the individual, 
shall we accept it in the life of any number of individu- 
als forming an organic body, say, the Church ? The 
apostle, writing to the Romans, says, "I am persuaded, 
that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, 
nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, 
nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be 
able to separate us from the love of God, which is in 
Christ Jesus our Lord." This may be paralleled with the 
blessed promise of Christ to his Church. While nothing 



REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED. 75 

ill the universe can separate us from God we know that 
we can separate ourselves by sin ; and while the gates 
of hell shall never be able to destroy the Church yet 
the Church may destroy itself by a decay of morals, of 
sound teaching, and by caring more for luxury and 
worldly power than for a pure gospel and a healthy 
ministry to the nations. History has given us, in the 
sense here meant, one fearful illustration of the self- 
destructive power of the Church in the tremendous 
evils which necessitated the Reformation. 

To the Church as well as to the individual believer 
has Christ given his commandments. It is commanded 
to perpetuate the memory of his death in the sacra- 
ment of the holy communion till his coming again; and 
we do not see how it could be a Christian church if it 
abolished that sacrament. He also gave it command- 
ment in its organic nature to go " and teach all nations, 
baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the 
Son and of the Holy Ghost, teaching them to observe 
all tilings whatsoever I have commanded you : and, lo, 
I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world " 
(Matt. 28. 19, 20). Now if obedience on the part of 
the believer to the commandments of Christ is the con- 
dition of union with him, of the presence of Christ in 
the soul, the same law must apply to the relation be- 
tween Christ and his Church. The Church cannot 
violate its commission, cannot ignore the sacraments 



76 REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED. 

of Baptism and of the Lord's Supper, or plunge into 
follies and vices, and substitute the teachings of phil- 
osophers and poets for the truths of the Gospel, and 
still maintain that Christ dwells in her and preserves 
her. The perpetuity of Christ's presence was not 
promised with that understanding ; and the Church 
has no authority for putting Christ's signature to such 
a document. Christ dwells in the Church, and guides 
it, as he does the individual, not by extraordinary dis- 
plays of omnipotence but by the inspiration of his 
Holy Spirit — who leads the Church into truth and 
makes it the witness of the truth already given — and 
by causing it to use the means of preservation purposely 
granted. Hence it must exercise a perpetual care for 
the faith once delivered, for it is only by doing this 
that it can preserve itself. The Church must know 
the truth, preserve the truth, and teach the truth. 
"Christ commissioned the Church to do this, and though 
it may do a thousand other needful and commanded 
duties, any prolonged incurable neglect to do this one 
thing w T ill bring an eclipse over its powers and pros- 
pects which will be only less than its defeat and ruin. 
It may teach the morals of the Gospel, the benevolences 
and charities and humanities of the Gospel, or it may 
pour through multitudes of hearts the rich tide of re- 
lined and exalted emotions ; it may kindle enthusiasm 
and build up characters of heroic and saintly mold ; it 



I? E A SONS FOR CHURCH CREED. 77 

may be wise and gifted as regards all learning ; it may 
sing hymns and recite prayers and march in endless 
procession around the aisles and altars of sanctuaries ; 
it may be the good Samaritan pouring oil into the 
wounds and wine into the famished mouths of sin- 
cursed nations; it may do all these things, and the doing 
of them may float it along the current for two, three, or 
four generations; but, looking at the great cycle of the 
centuries between the first and second coming of its 
Lord, it cannot hope to travel through that in the 
greatness of its strength or in the full majesty of 
corporate prerogative, unless it teach truly, purely, 
diligently, universally the one depositum of faith which 
it received at the beginning." * 

The chief heads of the doctrines which have been 
transmitted to the Church is the formulated belief or 
creed which it maintains as a guard against error, and 
as a guide to the believer as to what God has revealed 
and what his Son and the holy apostles command to 
be taught. " And he gave some apostles, and some 
prophets, and some evangelists, and some pastors and 
teachers, for the perfecting of the saints ; for the work 
of the ministry ; for the edifying of the body of Christ, 
till we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the 
knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, 
unto the stature of the fullness of Christ ; that we hence- 

*Amer. Ch. Rev. January, 1882. Rt. Rev. A. N. Littlejolm. 



78 REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED. 

forth be no more children, tossed to and fro, and car- 
ried about with every wind of doctrine, by the sleight 
of men, and cunning craftiness whereby they lie in 
wait to deceive." (Eph. 4. 11-14). The great creed of 
Christendom which lies back of all confessions of faith 
and declarations of councils is : 

I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of 
heaven and earth, and in Jesus Christ his only Son our 
Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Ghost; born of 
the Virgin Mary ; suffered under Pontius Pilate, was 
crucified, dead, and buried ; he descended into hell, the 
third day he rose again from the dead ; he ascended 
into heaven, and sitteth at the right-hand of God the 
Father Almighty ; from thence he shall come to judge 
the quick and the dead. I believe in the Holy Ghost, 
the holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, 
the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, 
and the life everlasting. Amen. 

Back to this creed evangelical Christendom is hasten- 
ing, and the day is coming when it will be the only 
creed of a united Christendom. 

Such are some of the reasons why there should be 
a creed and why the Church persists in announcing its 
belief notwithstanding the onslaughts that have been 
made against it by friend and foe. It has been shown 
in the first part of this defense that there is nothing 
in Church creed more incredible than the belief of the 



REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED, 79 

materialist — that creed does not make such demands 
upon the credulity of mankind as do the so-called 
facts of infidel science ; that the truths of creed are 
verifiable ; and that a creedless Christianity is not a com- 
missioned religion. In the second part the reason for 
creed lias been shown from the nature of the Church, 
in that it is the keeper and witness of the faith once de- 
livered to the saints ; that it is also a teaching body, eecle- 
sia docens; that it is the preserver and promoter of Chris- 
tian character; and that its perpetuity as a Christian 
Church depends upon its loyalty to the deposit of faith. 

In closing these brief pages it may not be amiss to 
answer one or two general statements against the rigor 
of the Church in maintaining allegiance to creed. It is 
sometimes asserted that a dogmatic Church is intolerant 
and that creeds bind the reason. " A divine revela- 
tion," it is said, " must necessarily be intolerant of con- 
tradiction ; it must repudiate all improvement on itself, 
and view with disdain that arising from the progressive 
intellectual development of man." * The same objec- 
tion is held against creed. 

First. Truth is necessarily intolerant of error. This 
fact lies in the nature of things, and cannot be other- 
wise, so that the Church cannot be held responsible for 
what is grounded in the constitution of things. It 
would be just as rational to hold it responsible for the 

* History of the Conflict of Religion and Science. Dr. J. W. Draper. 



80 RE A SON S FOR CHURCH CREED. 

course of the winds. Science will admit of no heresies 
in her wide domain. Professor Yirchow, in liis cel- 
ebrated address on Liberty of Science, affirmed with 
all the authority of an ecclesiastical dignitary, " We 
may not set down our hypothesis as a certainty, our 
problem as a dogma ; that cannot be permitted.'' In 
Logic there is no tolerance of fallacies ; nor in Govern- 
ment, nor in Society is there tolerance for what is in- 
imical to the being and welfare of the State. Gallio, 
" who cared for none of these things," is not a type of 
the Church nor of science nor of good government, 
but of those who treat Bible truth as synonymous with 
u religious opinion." Intolerance must not be con- 
founded with persecution. The former is the enemy 
of error, but the latter is the enemy of truth. Relig- 
ion ceases to be divine when she lays reason aside and 
takes up the carnal weapons of man's weakness, and 
instead of making herself immortal, digs her own grave, 
for " he who lives by the sword shall perish by the 
sword." The Church has no authority to enforce the 
truth; her commission is to teach it ; and when she goes 
beyond that and usurps the authority of the State she 
sins against God and man and is amenable to both. 

Second. Concerning improvement of divine rev- 
elation. The same objection would be valid against 
the facts of science. Is gravitation a fact, and can there 
be any improvement in it ? If a thing is true it is 



REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED. 81 

true, and cannot be otherwise and be true. But, on 
the other hand, while it is true that " the faith once 
delivered to the saints " can neither be changed nor 
added to, this immobility of fundamental principles is 
not, and never has been, considered as antagonistic to 
the progressive character of dogma in the hearts of 
believers or to the intellectual conceptions of the doc- 
trines revealed. This, however, is not the develop- 
ment advocated by Dr. Newman, for that ingenious 
theory is but a learned excuse for the papal assump- 
tion of adding to the faith, and so of creating new 
doctrines ; it is the development clearly manifest in 
the progress of doctrine as seen in the New Testament. 
This development of doctrine can never change the 
fundament truth, but, with the growth of the Christian 
consciousness, and the new light obtained through the 
labors of scholars in the many fields of biblical inves- 
tigation and the advancement of science, the form, the 
terms in which the dogma is couched, may be, has been 
and will be, changed. Sin is a fact, as is also its 
universality ; the incarnation, the atonement, the for- 
giveness of sins, future rewards and punishment — all 
these are fixed truths ; but the understanding of them 
is not fixed. Neither the first century nor the six- 
teenth century established forever the philosophic ex 
planations of those truths ; nor can it be affirmed that 
a full and adequate explanation will ever be reached. 



82 REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED. 

The Bible and the heart of man are as profound and 
contain as many mysteries as the material universe, 
and whatever is discovered in the one its counterpart 
will be found in the other. 

Finally, as to the charge often carelessly made, that 
creed binds the reason and awakens antagonism to 
science, it may be said in reply that Christianity only 
has made an age of reason possible. It would be an 
easy task to run through the history of civilization 
and from every age since the downfall of the Roman 
Empire to produce irrefragable proof that Christianity 
has been the mightiest auxilliary of the ideas of civil- 
ization and progress,* and that the best civilization of 
to-day is the child of Christianity. t The briefest sum- 
mary only will be given, and this not by us, lest it 
should appear like special pleading. Theodore Parker 
will not by any be considered as overfriendly to a 

* "LeCliristianism a ete sur tons les points le puissant auxiliarie 
des idees de civilization et de progres." — Troplong, De V Influence du 
Christ, sur le Droit Civil, p. 145; quoted by Farrar. Witness of His- 
tory to Christ. 

f " Wir sind unserer gansen zeit aus dem Boden des Christenthums 
niedergestellt und von ihra ausgegangen." — Fichte.. ibid. See also, 
Lecky, Hist, of Rationalism, vol. ii, 32, 261. Schmidt, Sur la Societe 
civile dans le Monde romain. Bunson, Gotl in du Gesch., v. 3. Mon- 
tesquieu, Esprit des Lois XIII. , 21. Dowlhtg's Introduction to the 
Study of Ecclesiastical History. 1838. Page 55: For the Preservation 
of Learning. 



REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED. 83 

dogmatic Church ; but from him we quote the follow- 
ing. Speaking of the Church, he wrote : 

" Its influence is perhaps greater than even its friends 
maintain. It laid its hand on the poor and down- 
trodden ; they were raised, fed, and comforted. It 
rejected with loathing from its coffers wealth gotten 
by extortion and crime. It touched the shackles of 
the slave, and the serf arose disenthralled, the brother 
of the free. ... It sent missionaries to the East and 
the West, and carried the waters of baptism from the 
fountains of Nubia to the roving geysers of a north- 
ern isle. It limited the power of kings, gave religious 
education to the people, which no ancient constitution 
ever aimed to impart ; kept on its hearth the smolder- 
ing embers of Greek and Roman thought. ... It 
sanctified the babe newly born and welcome — watched 
over marriage with a jealous care, fostered good morals, 
helped even by its symbols to partake the divine nature, 
smoothed the pillow of disease and death, giving the 
soul wings, as it went, to welcome the death angel, and 
gently, calmly pass away. It assured innocent piety 
of its reward in heaven, told the weak and weary that 
divine wings would help him, if faithful. In the hon- 
ors of canonization it promised the most lasting fame 
on earth — generations to come should call the good 
man a blessed saint, and his name never perish while 
the Christian year went round. 



84 RM4SQNS FOR CHURCH CREED. 

" Then, again, its character in theory was kindly and 
humane. It softened the asperity of secular wars, for- 
bade them in its several seasons, established the fear of 
God and gave a chance for rage to abate. Against the 
king it espoused the cause of the people. Coming in 
the name of one ' despised and rejected of men, a man 
of sorrows and acquainted with grief,' of a man born 
in an ox's crib, at his best estate not having where to 
lay his head ; who died at the hangman's hand, but 
who was at last seated at the right hand of God, and 
in his low estate was deemed God, in humiliation come 
down into the flesh to take its humblest form and show 
that he was no respecter, of persons—that Christ did 
not fail to espouse the cause of the people with whom 
Christianity found its first adherents, its apostles and 
defenders. With somewhat in its worst days of the 
spirit of him who gave his life a ransom for many ; 
with much of it really active in its best days, and its 
theory at all times, the Church stood up for long ages, 
the only bulwark of freedom, the last hope of man, 
struggling, but sinking, as the whirling waters of bar- 
barism whirled him round and round. . . . Even in 
feudal times it knew no distinction of birth, all ' were 
conceived in sin,' shapen in iniquity alike the peasant 
and the peer. The distinction of birth and of station 
was apparent, not real. All were alike the children of 
God, wiio judged the heart and knew men's person — 



REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED. 85 

all heirs of heaven, for whom prophets and apostles 
had uplifted their voice ; yes, for whom God had worn 
this weary wasting weed of flesh and died a culprit's 
death. . . . When northern barbarism swept over the 
ancient world — when temple and tower went to the 
ground, and the culture of old time, its letters, science, 
arts, were borne off before the flood — the Church 
stood up against the tide, shed oil on its wildest waves ; 
cast the seed of truth on its waters, and as they grad- 
ually fell saw the germ swell up its shoots, which grow- 
ing while men watch and while they sleep, after many 
days bears its hundred-fold a civilization better than 
the past, and institutions more beneficial and beautiful." 
— Discourse on Religion, pp. 397-399. 

On the other hand it has been asserted that much 
of the scientific culture and literary spirit of the pres- 
ent was derived from labors of Arabian scholars, who 
have never received the credit due them from their 
Christian successors. Dr. John W. Draper, in his 
History of the Development of Civilization in 
Europe, and in his one-sided work, History of the 
Conflict of Religion and Science, lays particular em- 
phasis upon this and the anti-scientific attitude of the 
Church. It is true that the universities of Bagdad 
and Damascus, and those of Cordova and Seville, 
exerted immense influence in the Dark Ages, in the 
sciences of medicine and astronomy, and kept alive 



80 REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED. 

the love of classical studies. But it should be remem- 
bered that the Arabian scholars obtained their knowl- 
edge of Greek literature from scholarly Christians of 
Syria, who translated the Greek authors into Arabic ; 
and that, as W he well, in his History of the Inductive 
Sciences, has shown, it was not until the sciences w^ere 
taken in hand by Christian scholars that any great ad- 
vance was made in this field of human knowledge. 
"What discovery, what result of Arabic study can be 
compared to the mighty achievements of Newton or 
Kepler ? 

Further, it can be shown, we tliink, that the Church 
originated the idea of educational institutions in* the 
modern sense. In ancient Athens the education under 
the Solonic law was disciplinary only. The schools of 
the philosophers were private conferences ; and it was 
not until the period of Vespasian and Hadrian, that 
instruction of the people was seriously thought of, and 
then rhetoric and philosophy seem to be the principal 
studies taught, the elements of education being taught 
by private persons. At this same time ancient Eome 
obtained schools of rhetoric and political science, while, 
as in Athens, the lower studies were obtained as one 
could. With the* accession of the Emperors Valen- 
tinian, Gratian, and Theodosius, a new era of educa- 
tion begins under Christian auspices. Then from the 
fall of the Roman Empire to the thirteenth century 



REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED. 87 

the superior education was entirely controlled by the 
Church. Xor did the great universities rise through 
the munificence of the State. They originated in the 
cathedral and monastic schools which had been estab- 
lished under the patronage of Christian scholars and 
supported by incomes from church property. Pass- 
ing from the Middle Ages to the Kef ormation period 
we find Luther and Melancthon the leaders of a new 
Church, the foremost advocates also of general educa- 
tion. In 1524 Luther urged the governments of Ger- 
many to establish schools, not only for boys, but also 
for girls, and in the same address pleaded for com- 
pulsory education. Melancthon aided in this work 
and traveled all over Thuringia, visiting churches and 
schools for the purpose of forming a plan of general 
education. In France there were at the close of the Re- 
formation some twenty-four universities, independent 
of the State, governed for the most part by the chief 
officers of the Church. In Scotland it was the reformer 
John Knox who founded the parochial system, and 
who, like Luther, insisted upon the State educating the 
people. Of the universities of Oxford and Cam- 
bridge, and of Harvard and Yale, and of many other 
great institutions both in England and in this country, 
it is not necessary to speak. The relation of the 
Church to education can be summed up in two sen- 
tences from one of the greatest thinkers of modern 



88 RE A SO A? S FOR CHURCH CREED. 

times, " That the clergy were the preservers of all 
letters and all culture, of the writings and even the 
traditions of literary antiquity, is too evident to have 
ever been disputed. But for these there would have 
been a complete break in Western Europe between 
the ancient and modern world." * 

It is true that oftentimes men of science have been 
persecuted by Church dignitaries, but it is also true that 
the worst persecutors and those who sustained these 
persecutions have been men of science. It was not 
the Church that harassed Harvey for his discovery of 
the circulation of the blood, nor Jenner for his theory 
of A^accination, but the physicians of London. To 
charge the Church with the crimes of some few leaders 
is about as just as if one should blame the students of 
science for the imprisonment of Galileo and Roger 
Bacon. Galileo had determined opponents among 
men of science whose enmity aided not a little the 
bigotry of inquisitors ; and he had many staunch 
friends among the ecclesiastics, some of whom were in 
much authority. Roger Bacon also had many friends in 
the Church, one of whom afterward became pope under 
the title of Clement IV., and honored him by request- 
ing from his pen a treatise upon the physical sciences. 
The Church has enough to answer for ; but that she is 
chargeable with retarding the progress of intellect, or 

* Mill, Dissertation, ii, 154. 



REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED. 89 

that a Church insisting upon true allegiance to creed 
does in so doing repress free inquiry, cannot now be 
maintained. Even in that age of the Church's his- 
tory, from the twelfth to the sixteenth century, which 
is usually referred to as belonging to that period of 
the Church which was most ignorant and most cor- 
rupt, an age when ecclesiastical power was exercised 
with tremendous energy over the princes and peoples 
of Western Europe — notwithstanding the crude state- 
ments of Buckle in his History of Civilization in 
England, to the effect that owing to the struggle be- 
tween " f eudality and the Church " men looked up to 
the nobles instead of the Church — in such an age 
more than forty universities were established : nineteen 
in France, six in Great Britain and Ireland, one in 
Belgium, two in Spain, and thirteen in Italy. And 
this farther may be said, that, notwithstanding all the 
alleged difficulties attending free inquiry, there is no 
department of human knowledge, whether w r e think 
of astronomy or geology, physiology or chemistry, 
mechanics or mathematics, that has not been enlarged 
by Christian scholarship. It were an invidious task 
to call the long roll of Christian scientists, navigators, 
and men of letters who made possible the intellectual 
progress of the present. But it will not be forgotten 
that it was an ecclesiastic, Copernicus, who discovered 
the revolutions of the planets around the sun ; that it 



90 REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED. 

was Gregory XIII. who reformed the calendar ; that 
it was Christian men of faith who first circumnavi- 
gated the globe, discovered the American continent, 
doubled the Cape of Good Hope, and that in other 
fields of science the names of Kepler, Leibnitz, Euler, 
Cuvier, Des Cartes, Sir Isaac Newton, Agassiz, and 
Owen have not yet been dimmed by the shining of 
brighter luminaries. But if, it be possible, and we 
believe it is, that grander intellects than these shall 
arise, and shall proclaim truths so profound and com- 
prehensive that the entire stock of the world's present 
knowledge will be to them as a child's primer is to the 
literature of a nation, will the Church of God — which 
has founded the universities on this continent and in 
Europe, and has poured out its treasures of silver and 
gold for the extension of sound learning, and is now 
by her multiplied agencies making such things possi- 
ble — will she be accounted an enemy to research and 
intellectual advancement? Where does Skepticism 
build her universities and colleges ? In what countries 
beyond the circle of Christendom has the human in- 
tellect made any approach to the sublime achievements 
of Christian thought, or the anti-Christian thought 
which has been fostered by Christian influences in the 
schools of Christian England, France, Germany, and 
America ? The Church, whatever baneful spells have 
been thrown around her by the ignorance of the world 



REASONS FOR CHURCH CREED. 91 

and the corruption of her members, lias still, more 
than any other power on earth, fostered science and 
encouraged literature and the fine arts. In the fine 
words of a Bampton lecturer, " Where will be found a 
succession of nobler intellects, of prof ounder thinkers, 
of more learned scholars, of more elevated moralists, 
of more subtle philosophers, of more successful toilers 
of the truth, than within the pale of the Church of 
Christ ? Freedom of thought, largeness of affection, 
nobility of character, and political freedom, have all 
been nursed beneath the shadow of dogma. The sole 
exceptions to this fact are to be found in the corrupt 
periods of the Church, when she had departed from 
the teachings of the inspired Scriptures and substi- 
tuted dogmas of man's making for dogmas of God's 
revealing. . . . But so long as the Church has been 
faithful to her trust, and has taught no dogmas 
but what are contained in or may be proved by Holy 
Writ, she has ever proved herself the nursing 
mother of free inquiry, religious liberty, and an 
advancing civilization." (Garbett's Bampton Lect- 
ure.) No honest doubter who has studied to any 
extent the history of civilization will imagine that 
the above is a rhetorical exaggeration of some real 

DO 

good arising indirectly from Christian teaching. It 
was the Church holding a dogmatic creed that, as 
Lecky says, "laid the very foundations of modern 



92 RE A SOX S FOR CHURCH CREED. 

civilization," * and it is to the Church, said Mazinni,f 
that we are indebted for the modern doctrine of " the 
unity of the human family and of the equality and 
emancipation of souls." 

The society of the future toward which our faces 
are turned as men who watch for the morning, or as 
the prophets of old looked for the coming of the 
King — a society which in all things that make for 
righteousness and peace and happiness among men 
shall transcend the present farther than we excel the 
semi-barbaric condition of feudal times — that society 
lies hid, like an oak in an acorn, within the leaves of 
the Bible, and as man becomes adapted to it by the 
gradual growth of his spiritual nature, Christian teach- 
ing, under the inspiration of the Spirit of life, devel- 
opment, and truth, will develop it as it has our age, 
and it will then be seen, as it is now only partially 
apprehended, that the only maker and saviour of so- 
ciety on this planet is the Church of the living God, 
holding with unchangeable firmness and love 

THE FAITH ONCE DELIVERED TO THE SAINTS. 



* Hist, of Rational. 

f Letter to Ecuraen. Council, Fort Rev., 1870. 



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